A review of the performance of the “other crops” sector for the first four months of this year prepared by the National Agricultural Research and Extension Institute (NAREI) painted what, from all appearances, was a justifiably glowing picture of the yield from commonly used greens, vegetables and fruit in Guyana. Even prior to the release of the NAREI review this newspaper observed and reported on the abundance of greens and vegetables available for sale in the city municipal markets. We well remember, for example, the mountains of tomatoes on stalls in the open air of Bourda being offered at two pounds for a hundred dollars and sweet peppers being sold at one hundred dollars a pound. Those prices are far from what obtains customarily.
From our conversations with the NAREI Chief Executive Officer Dr Oudho Homenauth we gleaned that the bountiful harvest was the outcome of a convergence of favourable circumstances, not least, good weather, minimal pest interference, diligent technical support from NAREI and, of course, the diligence of the farmers.
All that glitters, however, is by no means gold and once you had come to an understanding of the dynamics of trading in fruit, vegetables and greens you very quickly came to understand that beyond a certain point the plentiful nature of the yield ceased to work in favour of the farmers.
The earliest days of the bounty saw shoppers descend on the municipal markets to gorge themselves on bulk buying and presumably freezing and otherwise preserving. Tomatoes and sweep peppers aside, it was possible (and still is to some extent) to pick up bora, okra and boulanger at ‘giveaway prices. But then there is only so much cold storage space available and you knew when that saturation point was reached when you saw the worried looks of stallholders behind their mountains of greens and vegetables that appeared not to be shifting.
There is something acutely distressing about watching market vendors dispose of greens and vegetables before they rot and sometimes even when they are still edible. The exercise is a manifestation of the lopsided nature of our production process, the disparity between our capacity to produce an abundance of agricultural commodities and our painfully apparent lack of capacity to consume and market what we produce.
It is a painful manifestation of what, from time immemorial, has been our inability to create and sustain a manufacturing sector that is efficient enough, robust to spare us the economic pain of wastage. It is as much an indictment of successive governments for far too much lip service and too little practical application as it is a manifestation of the historic reluctance of the mainstream business community to invest in agriculture and agro processing.
It is too a reflection of our failure, over the years, to grasp what one might call the ‘low-hanging fruit’ that manifest themselves in the nearby CARICOM market for reasons most of which do not stand up to any rigorous scrutiny and in the case of the extra regional markets, because we fail to meet the higher standards set by metropolitan countries for allowing access by imported foods to their markets. Here, what comes to mind immediately, is the failure of successive governments to recognize the importance of having an infrastructure that has the capacity to provide quality guarantees for foods that target export markets.
All of this is not only a disincentive to our farmers but a blight on our development. What is at work here is the customary noise in the market (about the virtues of building strong export potential through high quality agro processing and manufacturing capacity) that does not more than drown out the fact that at the end of the day there is no sale whatsoever. The repetitive nature of the problem has long become decidedly overbearing.
